Political analysis, art, and humor

Election Reform

Voting should be private, but not secret. Speaking of rebooting an Internet government read what Jarvis is seeing at the World Economic Forum. A precondition is election reform:

Federalize voting procedure as a national standard.

Have double book accounting – Be able examine your vote in the “tallied” system at any point.

Make Election Day a Holiday or vote on Saturday.

Consider rolling back to October to allow proper recount.

Disband the Electoral College.

Paper ballot elections as the default.

Eliminate all commercial voting machines. But allow vote to be cast from the Internet.

Have a primary in each state on its own day, no overlaps. In this way national issues can be focused on the interests of the State. The electorate considers each State at a time.

Sell tickets to be the first to vote on Midnight Nov 4?

Although many people use absentee ballot, it has problems of casting votes ahead of candidates dropping or the value of issues changing.

Other notes from “Mike’s Election Guide 2008”

1) Hold all elections on the weekend.

2) Use paper ballots.

3) Hold regional primaries (North, East, South and West).

4) Shorten the election season to 4 months for the primaries (one month in each region) and 2 months for the GE. Publicly funded.

5) Public funding, free air time and spending limits for all politicians. In England it’s 38.5 million. Over $800 million will be spent on ads alone here in the US for a job that pays$400,000.

Speaking in favor of a long campaign. Voters need to get to know new personalities. No one knew who Barack Obama was, but his “community organizing” worked over time.

Moving beyond or before election reform is the issue of transparency and aggregation of responders – Perhaps we will see the new administrations use the Internet as effectively in governing as they did campaigning. A first class solution to voting to tabulate true popular responses, an open-ended blog pond of national issues consensus, and a reexamination of how government represents laws in process with Fedex tracking IDs and putting faces on who is for and against, executive orders you show approval with blogist side-chatter as to implications, pie-chart budgets you dial to give immediate feedback to the legislature and executives in charge.